The greatest barrier of entry to new gamers is often the very thing that allows gaming in the first place; the controller. Look at your Xbox or PS3 controller. It’s got around eight buttons in different places, a thumbpad, control sticks, it looks like something you’d find in the cockpit of a fighter jet more than what you use to move pixels around on a screen. Motion control is coming into its own with Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect, but is that enough? Or is the controller destined to stay part of the gamer’s arsenal? Forbes has the story.

Back in the Atari generation, controllers were just a stick and a button, and yeah, that was limiting. Nintendo ditched the stick and gave us two buttons, but we still had to use combo moves like Up-A to fire off special weapons. I think the Super Nintendo controller is the best of the bunch, simple enough to be inviting, fits in the hand well, and every button is right there under your fingers just from holding it.

Now we have these spaceship controllers, and mind-reading headbands, and energy fields that read your motions. It seems like there could be a compromise somewhere.